War Games Soliloquy
I can’t seem to help myself from getting into unintended projects. You’ve heard how this happens to me at my hilltop home, now let’s discuss my writing. I publish one story a day on this blog (occasionally supplemented with an extra and usually timely story here and there). That is about 1,300 words per day on average. People brag about Jack London writing 1,000 words a day every day. So, I think that qualifies me as staying well exercised in my writing skills, and every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. You may love some, you may dislike others, but they are all stories that tell a tale and have a point. When I go on a trip, especially a motorcycle ride, I chronicle that ride by writing a story each day along the way and turn my memories into stories that are intended as a rememberance for me and my riding pals and as something funny to discuss at breakfast each morning. I like the discipline of writing and it does a great job of filling the time gaps of life and giving me something other than news and movies to occupy my mind. And then, every once in a while I decide to do something bigger. This past year I wrote a 440-page compilation of all my motorcycle stories in a book I called The Ride is All (available on Lulu press if you desperately need a motorcycling coffee table book) and I wrote (technically ghost-wrote) a 150-page book for the daughter of a friend called Journey to the Dark: One Day at a Time – Finding New Life and Hope, which was the story about the recovery of an addict. I knew lots about motorcycling and knew next to nothing about drug addiction and recovery.
I have always considered myself to be a relatively quick study, probably because I am more satisfied than most in superficial rather than in-depth research. My imagination and information synthesis skills help me to take lint and spin it into whole cloth with ease. I suppose that makes me a bit of a dilettante, but that’s OK with me. I am not offended to be thought of as a jack of all trades and master of none. What that does do however, is to get me ensnared in projects that some might think I have no business being in. This has just happened again to me.
I have a long-time acquaintance from my days at Bankers Trust. He was a reasonably senior officer in the bank I joined in 1976. It is safe to say that I knew of him back then and got to really get to know him better in 1979 when I went to work for him. I worked for him twice from 1979 – 1982 and then again 1984-1985. Those were formative years for my career and he did right by me. His name is Andy and back in those days we knew his at Lieutenant Commander Andrew H. Forrester since he was an ex-Naval Aviator and somewhat of a ramrod-slender manager in our bank. By 1996 I had moved on with my career (still at Bankers Trust) and was actually senior to Andy, but he was in the process of retiring successfully anyway, so we were good friends by then. He was taking up motorcycling as a retirement pastime and I invited him on an inaugural ride into the wilds of Southern Utah since I had a home out there and had discovered its beauty on a solo ride the year before.
Andy not only joined in, but also brought along his neighbor Arthur, who has become a bright light in the firmament of my motorcycling panoply. We took a trip through Southern Utah that became the start of a motorcycle club that has helped define my life and is the central subject of my 440-page coffee table tome. On that first ride, Andy, a swamp Yankee never inclined to waste a dollar, borrowed my extra bike, a BMW LT100 for the ride. He was a bit skittish on the new bike and, truth be told, was only a modestly experienced rider at all. We got off to the inauspicious start on day 1 of the journey by him crashing my loaner motorcycle into my other motorcycle (a Honda Goldwing), making for a challenging insurance claim on either bike. I was a bit surprised since usually I consider flyers (he flew fixed-wing aircraft in the Navy) to be excellent vehicle operators due to their training. Andy was always a bit more circumspect on a motorcycle. Over the years since then, Andy and I have ridden a lot together and had a few run-ins of the non-physical sort as well. He and I are cut from very different cloth, but history is a great friendship binder in any case, so we have stayed close.
In 2013 we organized a Dalmatian Coast Ride through Croatia and the surrounding countries. That ride ended strangely because on the departure morning in Zagreb, Andy woke up with a mild stroke which caused him to temporarily lose his ability to communicate. That is a strange thing to watch a person go through and an even stranger thing to try to help a person grapple with. He has gradually come back and regained about 95% of his speaking and communicating ability, but while he says he still rides on day trips, we have not ridden together since then. But when he called me a few weeks ago, I sat up and listened, probably less because of our days of riding together and more because he played a formative role in my career and overall life trajectory and I felt I owed him the respect. He had a writing project he said he wanted to discuss with me, but what he really wanted was for me to write a story (more accurately a set of stories) that he wanted to tell.
As we all age, we all tend to become more obsessed with recording the days of our lives. I know I have felt that and so I write. Lt. Commander Andy Forester has also felt the urge to record his tales, but they are not tales of motorcycling or banking, they are tales of his years as a Naval Aviator. It seems that Andy had gotten together with another man of similar age (Gil) who had also spent time in the military in the early 1960’s and the two of them had shared war stories. Except they had not been in a war, per se. They had served their time in the military as young men doing their service during peacetime and had as their strongest remembrances, a set of tall and ribald tales of youthful male exuberance, set on the beaches of Virginia when stationed at the Norfolk Naval Base. Andy called me to ask me for help in the publishing of such a book of tall tales and we ended up agreeing that I might help him gather his and Gil’s stories and write a proper book which could then be self-published or sold for movie rights or whatever.
Wait a minute. Andy is a dozen years or so older than me so he grew up in a time that I don’t inherently understand. Furthermore, we are talking about partying military guys and I neither served in the military nor am I really much of a party person (I don’t drink now and didn’t drink even in college…for some unknown reason). Even though I never did a drug in my life, I was able to write a story about a young woman’s fall into drug addiction and then her long climb back out of that hole. But writing ribald stories about partying while in he peacetime military is even further afield from my personal experiences and my personal interests. But I have agreed to do it anyway and have started by having them both send me a few stories. I used those stories to craft a narrative and have written two chapters or about 30 pages so far that they are reviewing.
This morning I got an email from Gil telling me he has decided not to do the project despite his admiration of Andy. His reason is some vague reference to what he has found out about me on Wikipedia. I am stunned. I have, indeed, taken a few hits in my business life for things with which I have been involved. There was the hedge fund debacle at Bear Stearns and the unrelated movie blog posts that became the subject of a NY Times article. There was the involvement working for a company that was majority owned by the biggest blood diamond merchant in the world and our ensuing legal scuffle. And then there was leading the failed attempt to build the world’s largest observation wheel on New York Harbor. Only the first is the subject of my Wikipedia page, but Google will tell you about the other two. I am now unsure how or if to proceed with this project. Kim will be happy if I drop it since she is not and never was partial to the subject. What it forces me to say is that I am proud of my life and proud of all my experiences. I would not change a thing. I have done well by people my whole life and while this strong man has stumbled, he has stayed squarely in the arena at all times. At this point, War Games is feeling more and more like a soliloquy on Rich Marin than a book about past paramilitary glories.